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Super Bowl ad inflation and automobile prices

Dr. Mike Bernacchi is a professor of business administration at the University of Detroit Mercy. He also publishes a bizarre little newsletter called uNDER tHE mIKE-rOSCOPE, a PDF that resembles some oddball cross between a tinfoil-hat ranter's broadsheet, a 1990s teenager's desktop-published punkzine and one of those interminable overhead-projector transparencies that PowerPoint was supposed to save us from. Regardless of its aesthetic or literary merits (or lack thereof), a recent issue regarding the drastic increase in Super Bowl ad prices got us thinking.

In 1967, the year of Super Bowl I, an ad cost $40,000 for a half-minute of airtime. In 2012, 30 seconds of airtime during the big game will cost $3.5 million. That's 87.5 times more than a spot cost 45 years ago.

Bernacchi trots out a slew of numbers to point out just how far out of whack that seems, but with apologies to the philatelists out there, we know you don't particularly care what a stamp cost back then--or probably even know what one costs today. Instead, we decided to pick out a few iconic cars and see how they've fared.

During the Summer of Love, you could purchase an air-cooled, four-cylinder, rear-engined, carbureted Volkswagen Beetle for $1,769. Today, you can purchase a front-engined five-cylinder Beetle with fuel injection and a radiator for a shade less than $20,000. Now, if inflation had tracked with Super Bowl ad prices, today's Beetle should cost $154,787.50. It would also still have the engine in the rear, have grown two more cylinders and would feature a couple of small turbines attached to the exhaust.

How can we be so sure? On Porsche's Web site, its preconfigured 911 Turbo Sport rings in at $154,725.

If one considers going bargain hunting with a time machine and a fistful of dollars, the Lamborghini Miura is often a car that comes to mind. Generally considered one of the most beautiful sporting machines ever constructed, Lambo's tranvsverse-V12-powered slink-brute seems like a bargain at 20,000 late-'60s dollars. And even at about $130,000 in today's adjusted ducats, it seems like a wholly reasonable buy. Especially considering that a lowly Chevrolet Corvette can now touch $130,000 with the tick of a couple of boxes.

The admittedly special 1971 Miura P400 SV preproduction prototype sold for $1,705,000 last year--still less than a Veyron Super Sport for one of the Miuras of all Miuras. Plus, a Miura's always going to be prettier than one of those overstuffed Bugattis, no matter what Ferdinand Piëch tries to say about it. In the bizarro world of Super Bowl-ad-adjusted dollars, you'd be paying $45,000 more for a non-SV model with no provenance other than having rolled off the factory floor.

But say you're just not a Lambo guy. Say you're the sort of yahoo who enjoys activities such as spinning donuts one somebody else's lawn and/or running over old ladies at the county fair. Naturally, for such activities, a Chevrolet Camaro is your aspirational vehicle of choice, your platonic ideal of a racy, rumpity hooligan's machine. In 1967, a loaded SS350 would've cost you $3,411. Today? Well, we built a well-equipped 2012 Camaro in 2SS trim for $46,289. If the world were ruled by the economics of Super Bowl ads, that same bow-tie pony car would cost $298,462.50.

Somehow we find it doubtful that even Mayor Michael Bloomberg's kid could convince her dad to drop that sort of coin on a new Camaro, no matter how bitchin' she might find it.